Karl Polanyi Research Articles

The great trasformismo

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to explore the commonalities and differences between Karl Polanyi and Antonio Gramsci in their assessment of the origins of fascism as located within the rise of capitalism in the nineteenth century and its structural impasse in the twentieth century. Specifically, the aim is to trace a set of associations between Polanyi and Gramsci on the transformations wrought across the states-system of Europe prior to the crises that engulfed capitalism leading to the rise of fascism in the twentieth century. Focusing on the class structures that emerged out of the expansion of capitalism across Europe in the nineteenth century reveals that there was less a ‘great transformation’ in terms of a rupture with the past through the rise of liberal capitalism. Rather, there was more a slow and protracted process of class restoration known as passive revolution, or a ‘Great Trasformismo’, referring to the molecular absorption of class contradictions marking the consolidation and expansion of capitalist social relations. In sum, it is argued that The Great Transformation is understood better if read through the epoch of passive revolution, or The Great Trasformismo, which entailed the restoration and maintenance of class dominance through state power. This approach therefore opens up questions, rather than forecloses answers, about the historical geographies constituting the spaces and places of the political economy of modern capitalism.

The Power of Money: Critical Theory, Democracy, and Capitalism

The question of capitalism—of whether capitalist economic structures and their characteristic forms of power are compatible with democratic principles—is unsettled. In the wake of the 2008 financial and then Eurozone crises, in an era of skyrocketing material inequality and incredibly concentrated forms of capitalist power, critical theorists can no longer presume that Keynesian technocratic administration will successfully manage capitalist crises and economic conflicts (Azmanova, 2014; Fraser & Jaeeggi, 2018; Kim, 2014; O'Neill, 2017; Ronzoni, 2018; Streeck, 2014; Thomas, 2016a). In particular, as capitalist societies have moved from an era of industrial, welfare state capitalism to debt-based growth and consumption (Crouch, 2009; Prasad, 2013; Streeck, 2014), conflicts over the politics of debt, whether at the individual, the national, or, in the case of the Eurozone, the super-national level, have become increasingly important. This article draws together the social and political theory of Jurgen Habermas and Karl Polanyi to develop a general framework for critically analyzing this contemporary political situation. Advancing a new interpretation of Polanyi’s theory, I contend it can help correct shortcomings in Habermas’s theory of capitalism. While Habermas’s theory seeks to realize social freedom through law, Polanyi argues for the concrete institutionalization of social freedom through democratic self-organization and collective struggle in the economy. Critical theorists have drawn on Polanyi’s empirical categories like the double movement (Fraser, 2013, 2014), but I here reconstruct the broader theoretical concepts that inform his empirical analyses and illustrate their analytic and normative value.

A Path to a Countermovement? Forms of Integration in Polish Consumer Cooperatives

This paper discusses Polish consumer cooperatives in terms of the embedded economy as understood by Karl Polanyi. The author compares today‟s “new” cooperatives, or informal groups of consumers that have been emerging in Poland since 2010, with the “old” consumer cooperative movement that existed between 1906 and 1939, as represented mainly by the “Spolem” consumer cooperative union. Following Polanyi‟s understanding of the relationship between human economy and social institutions, I analyse reciprocity and redistribution as forms of economic integration in past and present cooperatives. Although the “new” cooperatives refer to the prewar cooperative traditions, their structure and economic operation differ vastly from the original model. I argue that the present structure of consumer cooperatives does not provide a base for symmetry and centricity – “supporting structures” for reciprocity and redistribution – although some of the new cooperatives do offer solutions for those deficits. This paper also discusses the nature of class barriers in the contemporary and historical consumer-cooperative movement, and relates this issue to Polanyian notions of countermovement and class interest.

The Development of Labor under Contemporary Capitalism

This paper offers a revised theoretical model to understand the historical development of labor under capitalism. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi, and Nancy Fraser, the revised model highlights how state politics and ideologies have reshaped formal and informal labor to fuel evolving accumulation models since the 1950s. It also deepens our analysis of the potential and limits of labor's contemporary countermovements. Potential advances must be read in terms of increased protection and increased recognition relative to earlier eras. Limits must be read relative to the hegemonic forces splintering workers’ countermovements. Applying the revised model to the empirical case of Indian informal workers in various sectors, I illustrate how the Indian state used informal workers as a political actor (not just an economic actor) to organize consent for a powerful new hegemonic project of market reforms (of the Gramscian variety) that undid labor's twentieth-century gains and empowered large businesses, but retained democratic legitimacy with the mass labor force. I also expose and evaluate two kinds of countermovements emerging from below by Indian workers: self-protection movements (of the Polanyian variety) and emancipatory/recognition movements (of the Fraserian variety). India's recent hegemonic project enabled informal workers to counteract the dehumanizing effects of labor commodification by offering an alternative labor protection model. This model has the potential to redefine the working class (and its protection) to include multiple employment relationships for the first time. It also promises to recognize the social relations between multiple categories of vulnerable populations, reminding us that caste, gender, and class are mutually constitutive (rather than mutually exclusive). But this model is highly constrained by contemporary hegemonic forces, highlighting the complex relationship of society to state—one of contestation and, for the sake of survival, collaboration.

A moral householding perspective on the sharing economy

In this paper, we scrutinise the sharing economy from a moral householding perspective and evaluate the moral justifications for a sustainable form of the sharing economy. We consider the emergence of normative moral justifications through householding practices that rest on local mobilisation of people in defence of communities and commitments against the adverse impacts of neoliberal market capitalism. Our perspective draws on Karl Polanyi's conceptualisation of householding, that is, autarchic, communistic provision in a closed community. Using timebanking as an example, we illustrate how a moral sharing economy can be mobilised in collective battles against the current neoliberal system of economic crisis. We contribute to the amassing sharing economy literature emphasising a central, yet missing element of the current discourse: householding as practices creating self-sufficiency and autonomy as well as combining both kin and stranger.

On the Nature of the Countermovement: A Response to Stuart et al.’s ‘Climate Change and the Polanyian Countermovement: Carbon Markets or Degrowth?’

ABSTRACTIn a recent article for this journal, Stuart, D., Gunderson, R., and Petersen, B. [(2017). Climate change and the Polanyian counter-movement: carbon markets or degrowth? New political economy, 1–14. doi:10.1080/13563467.2017.1417364] discuss solutions to climate change in terms of Karl Polanyi’s concept of the double movement. They set up their argument as a critique of my own article on the topic to make the point that carbon markets do not constitute a genuine form of such countermovement. I’m sympathetic to the critique of carbon markets that the authors present, as well as their discussion of degrowth, which mirrors a by now extensive literature demonstrating the pitfalls respectively the necessity of these diametrically opposed approaches to the current socioecological crisis. However, in setting up their case the authors provide an overly optimistic reading of Polanyi that I believe misses a crucial part of his argument, a reading that at least partly explains our differences in opinion. This commentary offers a friendly critique of Stuart et al.’s use of Polanyi and clarifies the argument in my previous text that the authors take issue with.

Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, by Gareth Dale. Columbia University Press, New York, 2017, 400 pp., ISBN: 9780231176095, $27.00, paperback.

British Journal of Industrial RelationsVolume 56, Issue 3 p. 688-690 Book Review Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, by Gareth Dale. Columbia University Press, New York, 2017, 400 pp., ISBN: 9780231176095, $27.00, paperback. David Hollanders, David Hollanders University of AmsterdamSearch for more papers by this author David Hollanders, David Hollanders University of AmsterdamSearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 August 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12414Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume56, Issue3September 2018Pages 688-690 RelatedInformation

Reading Polanyi in Erbil: understanding socio-political factors in the development of Iraqi Kurdistan

ABSTRACT The Kurdistan Regional Government emerges out of the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq as a rare positive, providing both political stability and economic growth. However, the outward display masks a more complex domestic settlement where the trappings of the free market coexist with political parties who are significant economic actors. How can this model of development in Iraqi Kurdistan be explained? Turning to the writings of political economist Karl Polanyi, does his thinking on relations between society and economy offer a way to unpack the development? And what does this analysis tell us of prospects for Iraqi Kurdistan?

Karl Polanyi as a spatial theorist

ABSTRACT The ‘spatial’ turn in political economy has re-invigorated Marxian analysis, allowing for new research programmes into urbanization, geopolitics, and social movement activity amongst other topics. This tendency emerged through a critical re-reading of Marx and Gramsci, amongst others, uncovering spatial analyses embedded in the logic of their arguments. Conversely, Karl Polanyi’s interlocutors have tended to add geographical analysis as an additional layer of theory, reading space ‘in’ to the text. However, a close reading reveals that a concern with space permeates Polanyi’s analysis. As such, it is possible to read space ‘out’ of Polanyi, adding a level of theoretical rigour and logical consistency when applying his insights to geographic topics. This article carries out an exegesis of Karl Polanyi’s work, uncovering a theoretical framework that deals with space, place, scale, fixity, and motion. From this vantage point, the article considers the potential implications of this new geographical reading of Polanyi.

Market/society: mapping conceptions of power, ideology and subjectivity in Polanyi, Hayek, Foucault, Lukács

ABSTRACT In light of discussions around the common anniversary of the publication of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, this article puts these texts – iconic representations of social democratic and neoliberal political theory – into conversation with Michel Foucault’s subsequent, influential critique of neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics. There are interesting points of contact in the way each text constructs its argument, even as they arrive at distinct positions vis-à-vis the material and subjective nature of market society, while nevertheless sharing an opposition to Marxian approaches. Yet the work of Polanyi and Hayek’s Marxian contemporary, Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, offers precisely a critical framework for understanding the relationship between markets, liberty and society in which the material and the subjective need not be read as antagonistic. It is thus also examined here, in an effort to shed light on how discussions of contemporary neoliberalism are framed.

Polanyi, Hayek and embedded neoliberalism

ABSTRACT Written originally on the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, this article critically analyses how the ideas of Hayek and Polanyi have been deployed to understand neoliberalism. It argues that dominant scholarly interpretations tend to miss the significance of each thinker to an understanding of neoliberalism, as well as some of the key dynamics of neoliberal forms of capitalist regulation. Drawing upon the work of Polanyi, the article advances the concept of embedded neoliberalism. From the 1970s neoliberal regulations became deeply embedded in a series of institutions, class relations and ideological norms. This helps to explain both the durability of neoliberalism, and the onset of crisis in 2008. In this context, Hayek’s ideas are best understood as providing a malleable set of concepts underpinning neoliberal ideology, rather than the chief causal agent in the neoliberal transformation of states and economies.

Neoliberalism as a real utopia? Karl Polanyi and the theoretical practice of F. A. Hayek

ABSTRACT This article interprets Hayek’s theoretical practice with the help of Polanyi’s framework. Hayek aimed at renewing liberalism after the interwar period, thus helping transforming it into neoliberalism, a real utopia instrumentally concerned with the political and moral economies underpinning markets. The distance between neoliberal theory and practice is less pronounced than it is sometimes assumed. The strength of neoliberalism partially stems from a capacity to articulate an effort to think about real-world mechanisms with an effort to demolish, reconfigure or transform existing structures. Despite his failure to anticipate neoliberalism, Polanyi gives ample intellectual resources to critically interpret the tasks that neoliberals would collectively have to face at the theoretical level, in an epoch of ideological marginality, before their triumphal political deployment at the global level.

‘Our world was made by nature’: constructions of spontaneous order

ABSTRACT This article explores the concepts of spontaneity and spontaneous order, in particular their deployment by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi. Although in many respects these thinkers were poles apart, the article identifies a point of convergence. They both mobilize the concept of spontaneity in a manner that naturalizes a particular social process: for Hayek, the market economy, for Polanyi, society’s protective movement that arises in reaction against the market economy. To contextualize the uses of spontaneity by Hayek and Polanyi, I trace its evolution, with reference to Leibniz, Mandeville, and the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Having sketched the ways in which earlier thinkers understood spontaneity, I turn finally to Hayek and Polanyi. I argue that their invocations of spontaneity and spontaneous order contribute to a downplaying of relations of domination and exploitation. While Hayek sees the market system as the exemplar of spontaneous order, for Polanyi, the concept of spontaneity underpins his belief that the protective countermovement is a ‘natural’ reaction to the evils of market society; as such, power relations pass beneath the radar.

Polanyi vs Hayek?

ABSTRACT Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek are often portrayed as implacable intellectual opponents but their respective historical trajectories suggest some telling similarities. Here we describe some key similarities in their approach to markets, as a prelude to evaluating the political consequences of relying upon their Austrian conceptions of nature-based and constructivist framing of markets. Perhaps it is time to transcend their dichotomy.

Polanyi’s two transformations revisited: a ‘bottom up’ perspective

ABSTRACT In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi offers a ‘top-down’ analysis of the rise and demise of Europe’s unregulated market system. He assumes that changes in the organization of the international economy provide particular kinds of opportunities for states to act which, in turn, shapes the extent to which social forces will be able to influence state policy. Consequently, his analysis focuses, first, on the international institutions created by the self-regulating market system; then on the ‘liberal state’ which these made possible; and finally on how the system impacts ‘society as a whole’. The account which this analysis produces systematically underplays the social struggles which propelled and emerged from the rise of Europe’s nineteenth century system and which ultimately led to its demise. In revisiting the two periods that are the focus of Polanyi’s analysis, this article assumes that states and interstate systems reflect the interests of powerful social forces. Thus, working from the ‘bottom up’, it focuses on the class interests that produced Europe’s market system, the state and international structures which reflected and supported them, and the social struggles that ultimately brought about the collapse of the system. What this ‘bottom up’ account reveals is the centrality of a ‘double movement’, not of market expansion and a protective countermove on the part of ‘society as a whole’, but of dominant classes monopolizing economic opportunities from global expansion, and a rising ‘red tide’ of disaffected workers. This double movement, it argues, better explains the demise of the system and the changes that ensued from it.

Marketization and development on a European periphery: From peasant oikos to socialism and neoliberal capitalism on the Danube-Tisza interfluve

The modern term economy is associated above all with market exchange. But it derives from the Greek oikos, which for Aristotle referred to the well-managed estate, able to withstand the forces of supply and demand by virtue of a high degree of self-sufficiency. The paper explores the long-term discontinuous expansion of the principle of price-forming markets (in the sense of Karl Polanyi) at the expense of self-sufficiency in a zone of the Great Hungarian Plain where the author has carried out long-term field research. The historically “backward” region of the Danube-Tisza interfluve has been integrated into wider historical processes through different forms of market exchange, first under peripheral variants of capitalism, then in the later decades of socialism, and recently under neoliberal capitalism in a political climate of “illiberal democracy” or populism. The paper analyses continuity and change across these epochs at the societal level, with ethnographic illustrations. In addition to Polanyi’s notions of “market society” and “double movement”, it draws theoretically on Ferenc Erdei’s agenda to overcome rural backwardness through embourgeoisement; it is found that the interests of the rural population were more effectively promoted in the decades of market socialism than in any other period before or since.

‘Wholesome regulation and unlimited freedom’: governing market space in southern Ireland before the Famine

ABSTRACT:This article addresses efforts to reform market activity in pre-Famine Ireland, exploring Karl Polanyi's assertion that the ‘free market’ required ‘the intervention of the state in order to establish it’. It begins by rooting Ireland's alleged ‘social ills’ – over-population and subsistence agriculture – in terms of integration into international markets from the mid-eighteenth century. From the crisis of the 1820s, state actors came to see the extension of the cash economy as central to remedying these ‘ills’. Altering the physical fabric of exchange to encourage ‘rational’ market behaviour, I argue reformers aimed to ‘enclose’ commercial spaces economically and physically from non-market forces. Utilizing novel technologies of vision and precision, market space could thus operate according to a logic and ethics of its own, inculcating voluntary compliance through new standards of ‘trust’ and ‘fairness’. I conclude by asking, if indeed the state had come to operate as much through ‘freedom’ as force by 1845, how we might begin to reassess the course and context of the Irish Famine.

Democracy disembedded

Democracy is in serious difficulties. Three features of the crisis stand out. First is the dominant culture of disillusionment in democracy, which transpires as the mistrust in constitutionalist institutions and values. Second, political authority, both at domestic and international levels, is largely substituted by the rule of non-transparent and unpredictable social powers. Third, democratic states are deprived of much of their capacity to govern, but they retain a non-negligible capacity to coerce. The article is structured as follows. Section I introduces Karl Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness and juxtaposes it to the theoretical defense of market disembeddedness advanced by the classical political economy. It then points to the challenge that the complexity of the contemporary society poses to the idea of embeddedness and identifies the need for further analytical clarification of the idea. Section II tries to explain why the idea of embeddedness is intuitively suspect. One reason is found in the dominant understanding of liberalism as a regime that rests on the separation between private and public realms. The section closes with a reference to internal tensions of this reading of liberalism. Section III provides a diagnosis of the contemporary condition of disembeddedness. The core claim is that the combination of neoliberalism and globalization has created a condition of multiple—normative, social, political and legal—disintegration, which questions the very survival of democracy. Section IV addresses the question of transformation, focusing on the need for the reconceptualization of liberal equality.

Adam Smith and Thorstein Veblen on the Pursuit of Status Through Consumption versus Work

‘The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that a man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships.’ (Karl Polanyi, 1944, p. 46) ‘...all the best business men want to get money, but many of them do not care about it much for its own sake; they want it chiefly as the most convincing proof to themselves and others that they have succeeded.’ (Alfred Marshall 1890, p. 635) ‘[T]he competitive order must be partly responsible for making emulation and rivalry the outstanding quality in the character of the Western peoples who have adopted and developed it.’ (Frank Knight, 1999, p. 39) Adam Smith and Thorstein Veblen, divided culturally and by over a century of capitalism’s differing degrees of maturation, analysed the basic institutions of capitalism in radically different manners and came to contrary views as to capitalism’s serviceability to human welfare. Yet, despite their differences, and that Veblen appears not to have read Smith’s principal treatise on human behaviour, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, they shared remarkably similar views as to why humans behave as they do. Both saw humans as seeking self-respect by acquiring approval or social certification from others, often pursued through conspicuous consumption. However, whereas Smith viewed the seeking of status through consumption as stimulating economic dynamism, Veblen viewed it as generating waste and impairing human welfare, claiming work as a socially superior channel for acquiring social and self-respect. Nevertheless, what is broadly common in their theories of human behaviour has great importance for social theory, and especially for addressing the contemporary mistake in wealthy societies of sacrificing important social goals to the pursuit of ever-more material wealth.

O DEBATE NA GRANDE TRANSFORMAÇÃO

O debate relativo ao cálculo económico em socialismo, iniciado por Ludwig von Mises, contou com a participação de Karl Polanyi e de Friedrich Hayek, moldando de diferentes formas o seu pensamento. Este artigo sintetiza alguns dos contributos para este debate sobre o estatuto e o lugar dos mercados, indicando como contribuiu para consolidar uma abordagem neoliberal à economia política institucionalista, mas sobretudo como moldou a original economia política institucionalista crítica de Karl Polanyi. Esta última foi construída numa discussão acesa com o liberalismo económico mais intransigente, a qual continua a enquadrar muitas questões actualmente relevantes.